


Palimpsest

by Mount_Seleya



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Betaed, Canon Deconstruction, Complicated Relationships, Dadcroft, Drug Use, F/M, Family Dynamics, Harry Potter Next Generation, Infidelity, Long-Term Affair, M/M, Muggle John, Muggle Mycroft, Muggle Sherlock, Muggle/Wizard Relations, Not Britpicked, Parentlock, Unresolved Romantic Tension, internalized prejudice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-20
Updated: 2013-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-05 05:28:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 14,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1090150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mount_Seleya/pseuds/Mount_Seleya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hermione, young and unhappily married to Ron, has a chance meeting with a Muggle government official named Mycroft Holmes. Over the next three decades, the ripples created by the ensuing extramarital entanglement threaten to ruin Hermione's family, save Mycroft's, and reunite the divided world which they have both come to take for granted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> After reading the Violet Tillyman/Myron Otherhaus story on Pottermore, I wondered about other names that might produce similar mishaps, and the result was a humorous _Harry Potter_ / _Sherlock_ crossover one-shot that somehow grew longer and more serious.
> 
> Thanks to Anakin_McFly for the beta read.

Lungs burning, dragon-hide briefcase clutched tightly in her hand, Hermione hurled herself into the emerald flames. "Take me to my home!" she barely managed to huff out between great, heaving pants.  
  
Unfamiliar hearths flashed by in rapid succession. _Why can't you prepare your own ruddy meals, Ron?_ she thought. Here she was, not even twenty-two, come out the other side of war only to end up hurrying home to play wife after a long day's toil at the Ministry while her husband got to spend his days at Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes.  
  
The rush of fireplaces ended abruptly. Hermione found herself lurching forward onto an unfamiliar floor. For a moment, she just laid there in a pathetic heap, coughing and spluttering as ash settled around her. Then she pushed herself up onto her feet, taking in her surroundings as she brushed off her dirty, rumpled blouse-front.  
  
Four walls lined with books. At the other end of the room, a pinstripe-suited man was seated behind a desk: early-to-mid thirties, neatly-trimmed russet brown hair, staring down his pointed nose at her with small, shrewd eyes.  
  
"Sorry, I must have not spoken clearly," she said, vaguely motioning toward the fireplace behind her back.  
  
"So it would seem," the man replied in a crisp, circumspect tone.  
  
Suddenly, Hermione noticed the ballpoint pen clutched in his hand, the black telephone positioned within easy reach. "This must be a mistake. Only the Prime Minister is supposed to be connected to the Network."  
  
"There are always certain...exceptions," the man explained. Or, rather, _didn't_.  
  
"Are there?" Hermione shot back, sounding coy when she'd intended to sound indifferent. Behind the man's cool, steady gaze, intellect flickered like a flame, and she found herself inexorably drawn to it like a moth.  
  
"No," the man said, lips curving into something like a smile. "There is but a single exception."  
  
Hermione allowed her gaze to drop briefly and noted the absence of a wedding band on the man's left hand. When her eyes flicked back up, she found one thin, arched eyebrow quirked at her in open bemusement. Tamping down an unbidden flutter in her chest, she turned and located a pot of Floo powder on the mantel, scooped up a handful.  
  
"I apologise for the intrusion," she said hastily, tossing the powder onto the grate. Without hazarding a parting glance, she proceeded to step into the flames, her heart thudding loudly in her ears as she yelled, "Home!"

 

* * *

  
  
With a sharp, strangely satisfying _clink_ , Hermione set the final plate on the rack of the dishwasher. Uneaten lasagna oozed down the upended dish, then disappeared from sight as the door slid shut, and the machine hummed to life.  
  
Hermione turned to look at her mother. The older woman nodded, her thin lips stretching into a small, fragile smile.  
  
Something had been broken, that day Hermione had pointed a wand at her parents, stealing into their minds and tampering with their memories because she had deemed it more expedient than trying to explain the War to them. In only six years at Hogwarts, she'd become a witch, and her parents had become something other — something _less_.  
  
Unbidden, Hermione's hand flew to the pocket of her jumper, fingering the solid length of vine-wood contained within. Magic buzzed up her fingers. Thrummed through her blood. Called to her like a siren-song.  
  
Mrs. Granger's eyes narrowed, her smile dissolving into a hard, taut line. Hermione knew she was damming a torrent of words, biting back all of the things she had agreed not to say in exchange for an embargo on magic within her home.  
  
 _Why did you settle for Ron Weasley?_ Hermione nonetheless read in her mother's eyes.  
  
That night, ensconced in the privacy of her study while her husband slept upstairs, Hermione began cataloging every name that could conceivably be gleaned from the breathless utterance of "my home" on a scrap of parchment.

 

* * *

  
  
Upon entering the hotel room, Hermione was greeted by the sight of sleek cream silk and rich, honey-coloured wood. The door closed with a _snick_ , and then large, warm hands alighted gently on her shoulders from behind. They smoothed up along the curve of her neck and removed the silver pin holding her untidy updo in place.  
  
She heard a soft, reverent gasp as her hair spilled free, and in that instant knew she had misjudged Mycroft Holmes: beneath the cool reserve and posh trappings, he was a man who craved simple, earthly pleasures.  
  
A few minutes later, she felt his touch ghost over the hateful graffito marring the soft, smooth skin of her left forearm.  
  
"'Mudblood' is a slur for —" she began to explain.  
  
"I am familiar with the word's meaning," he interposed quietly. His eyes flicked up to meet hers, then, and she saw the rueful weight of understanding settle within them, and realised that she, too, had been misjudged.  
  
And as he pressed her back onto the bed, murmuring, "you brave, brave creature," she shut her eyes in surrender.

 

* * *

  
  
Hermione didn't know which was better: the lovemaking, or the long, companionable silence that always came after. Laying engrossed in a novel for what seemed like hours while Mycroft rustled through papers beside her.  
  
Sometimes, he tilted his head over toward her, made a wry comment about her literary preferences. She responded with a playful jab to an improbably freckled shoulder and watched his soft belly shake with laughter.  
  
In a month of stolen afternoons spanning two years, she learned he liked Hemingway, rain, and imported cigarettes. That, although he singlehandedly oversaw the Muggle government of the United Kingdom from behind the scenes, the worry which gnawed at his mind most frequently was a recklessly brilliant younger brother with a drug habit.  
  
She slowly accepted that her mother was right: she married too young. Jumped straight from girl to wife without pausing to be simply an adult woman, because she was alive, Ron was alive, and what point was there in waiting? They'd survived, they had each other, and there was the rest of their lives left to figure out how to make things work.  
  
 _Mycroft is just something I need to get out of my system_ , she told herself whenever guilt caught up with her.


	2. Chapter 2

Mycroft carefully set the piping-hot cup of tea down on the table beside Hermione's loosely-curled hand. Absently, she noted that he had remembered to add two sugars and one cream, just the way she preferred.  
  
"Tell me Ron doesn't deserve me," she said, dragging her gaze up as he sat across from her. Her eyes were tired and searching, rimmed with the kohl of too many long, sleepless nights spent tweaking her proposed elf-rights bill. She wanted an out, a license to walk away, a reason to let hate choke the treacherous feeling taking root in her heart.  
  
But Mycroft merely flicked open his copy of _The Times_ and flashed her an oddly tolerant sort of not-smile.  
  
"I know that's what you think," Hermione pressed. "That he's uncultured and needy and beneath me. So just say it."  
  
"I rather think it isn't my place," he countered, his gaze meeting hers evenly over the top of his newspaper.

 

* * *

  
  
All around, machines beeped and whirred, filling the small, sterile room with a constant murmur of sound. Perched in one of two chairs beside the bed, Mycroft's face was ashen and drawn, his suit wrinkled from too many hours of wear.  
  
The inert man lying connected to a multitude of tubes and wires was like something out of a Greek tragedy: high cheekbones, dark curls, and full, pouting lips, a face too young to die but too beautiful to ever grow old. Hermione would've taken him for a stranger if she weren't already aware that he was Mycroft's brother.  
  
"Damn it, Sherlock," Mycroft rasped, bending forward to take a limp hand between both of his own.  
  
Looking over, Hermione saw then that the careful mask of impassivity Mycroft habitually wore had fallen away, revealing a mixture of fear, helplessness, and devotion that made her heart clench pitifully in her chest. He must have shed a full two stone over the last few months; he somehow seemed too slight in his immaculately-tailored suit. She rose slowly from her seat and gave his shoulder a light, reassuring squeeze, said, "I need to get some air."  
  
Once outside, she sucked in a deep, bracing lungful of crisp autumn air and started walking. She let her feet carry her a full five blocks from the hospital before stopping, hands thrust deep into her coat pockets, mind careening.  
  
She thought of Ron, away on Auror business with Harry, unaware of how his wife has been having an affair for four years; remembered the shattered look which crossed her mother's face when she lifted the false memory charm; wondered whether she would be dithering right now if the man whose life was in her power to save was a wizard.  
  
An hour later, she reentered the hospital room, flushed and winded. Beelining to the bed, she fished a phial of blue liquid out of her pocket with one hand, wrenching open Sherlock's mouth and tipping his chin back with the other.  
  
"Detoxifying Draught," she preemptively explained at the sound of Mycroft abruptly rising from his chair.  
  
"This violates the Statute of Secrecy," he hissed. "You could be sacked. Or _worse_."  
  
"He's your brother," Hermione said, thumbing off the phial's cap and pouring the potion down Sherlock's gullet.  
  
For the next ten minutes, they waited at Sherlock's bedside, until at last he began to mutter and stir feebly.  
  
"We've got nothing to help him through withdrawal, I'm afraid," Hermione told Mycroft.  
  
"I fear accounting for Sherlock's miraculous recovery shall prove far more troublesome," he replied with a heavy sigh.  
  
Hermione found herself laughing. "Do miracles need explanations? Isn't that what makes them miraculous?"  
  
Mycroft turned a weary smile toward her. "For others, perhaps, but not my brother. You do not know him. He will comprehend immediately that something does not add up and will not rest until he uncovers the truth."

 

* * *

  
  
"Is that the third glass of champagne you've waved away tonight?" a hushed baritone behind Hermione inquired.  
  
Struggling to conceal her startled shudder, Hermione turned and gave Sherlock a small, tart smile. "I've got to drive."  
  
"You came in Mycroft's hired car." Sherlock leant in close, invading her personal space, his breath hot against her ear. "So, tell me, what was it? Missed pill? Slipped johnny? And when might I expect to become a proud uncle?"  
  
Hermione stepped back, stomach lurching, face aflame. Never before had she regretted helping save someone's life. Not even Draco Malfoy's. But then, Draco had been gracious, in his own distant, haughty way.  
  
"Happy birthday," she spat, skewering Sherlock with a stony glare. "Nice you lived to see another year, isn't it?"  
  
Sherlock's green-grey eyes lit up. Hermione couldn't help noting the odd brown freckle above the pupil of the left one. "He doesn't know yet, does he?" he said, his head tipping back slightly. "Nor does your husband. Not a surprise, that. Bit thick, isn't he? But for an intelligent mind to be so dulled by _sentiment?_ Rather a pity."  
  
Hermione's mouth dropped open, then promptly snapped shut, her hand twitching at her side for want of her wand.  
  
"Oh, but I don't blame you," Sherlock continued. "You're _bored_. Coddled only daughter of dentists, far too clever for her own good, said yes to the first chap who asked because she couldn't bear to say no. Youngest of six, is he?"  
  
"It's impressive, this seeing-through-people trick of yours, but you still know _nothing_ about who I truly am."  
  
As Hermione spun around and walked off, she wasn't sure if she was slamming a door, or laying down a challenge.

 

* * *

  
  
Wan morning light cut across Mycroft's sparsely freckled back from between the slightly parted curtains. Hermione stood over his sleeping form silently, willing him to wake, roll over, and turn his piercing blue-grey eyes up at her.  
  
Bending down, she pressed a tender kiss to his temple, where his fine russet hair was starting to recede.  
  
"Open your eyes," she whispered, knowing that if he did, they would cross the point of no return. She would be his, he would be hers, and this tiny, incipient thing secreted deep inside of her would forever be _theirs_.  
  
A minute passed, but Mycroft did not rouse, only wheezed out a soft, sighing breath and shifted slightly. Sadness twisting her heart, Hermione pulled back, set the envelope in her hand on the bedside table beside the alarm clock. Then she took her wand out of her coat pocket and cut a lock of hair off the back of his head.  
  
 _Just in case there's any doubt_ , she thought, shutting the door to the hotel room behind her.


	3. Chapter 3

Another wrenching spasm tore through Hermione's body from its epicentre in the curve of her abdomen. Her mind blacked out for an instant, then fired back up, racing to recalculate the spacing of her contractions. Heaving herself awkwardly off of the sofa, she stumbled over to the coffee table, sweat-slick thighs slipping against each other within the loose billowy skirt of the floral-print sundress Ginny had bought for her.  
  
 _I hate maternity clothes_ , she thought, fingers closing around the shaft of her wand. She missed the solid, anchoring heft of the kind of clothes she wore to work, the smart tweeds and efficient houndstooths.  
  
" _Expecto patronum_ ," she whispered, but instead of her familiar otter, a horned owl burst from the tip of her wand. For a moment, she just blinked as the Patronus circled soundlessly around her head, trailing shimmery silver mist. Then, fighting back a sudden sinking uncertainty, she told the owl, "It's time, Ron. Meet me at St. Mungo's."  
  
Numbly, she watched the Patronus fly out of the window, its gossamer ghost-shape melting into the bright blue sky.

 

* * *

  
  
What surprised Hermione most was how quiet Rose seemed for a baby. Albus wailed and wailed, but Rose just stared up placidly from her bassinet with wide, curious eyes too blue to be called grey and too grey to be called blue. By her first spring, she was toddling around the garden on short, chubby legs. With her wild auburn curls and the freckles the sun brought to her cheeks, she looked the perfect Weasley in her oversized, hand-knitted "R" jumper.  
  
Did it matter that Rose's sharp little nose wrinkled as if she were smelling something foul when she was displeased? Ron was over the moon and the girl quietly bore having her tiny face painted Cannons orange.

 

* * *

  
  
Raindrops flying off of her twirling umbrella, Rose's pink, polka-dotted wellies splashed down in the puddle. Through the half-open sliding door of the sunroom, Hermione could hear the two-and-a-half-year-old singing loudly to herself, and smiled for a moment before turning her attention back to the stack of paperwork lying on the table.  
  
Hugo was sleeping soundly in his playpen. He slept a lot. Rose's interest in him hadn't lasted very long.  
  
A few minutes later, Hermione heard a high, angry shriek. Looking up frantically, she saw that Rose had fallen face-first onto the muddy grass, her little pink umbrella having landed too far for her fumbling hand to reach. Then, suddenly, the umbrella slid across the ground, its handle fitting back into place in the girl's waiting palm.  
  
Before Hermione could respond, Rose picked herself up and bounded into the sunroom, dripping mud onto the floor. "Magic, Mummy!" she cried gleefully, bouncing up and down. "I did magic! Did you see?"  
  
Excitement, pride, and relief swelled in Hermione's chest. But underscoring it all was the stinging shame that came with realizing she'd been fearing her daughter's blood might be too diluted for her to inherit magical ability. When had she become the sort of person for whom the prospect of raising a non-magic child was unthinkable?

 

* * *

  
  
Kingsley's dark eyes lifted to meet Hermione's as she dropped the morning's _Sun_ down in front of him on his desk. _Suicide Shocker: Transport Minister Found Dead_ , screamed the headline in lurid block lettering.  
  
"That makes three," Hermione announced. "The Metropolitan Police are calling them 'serial suicides.'"  
  
"I know you've been pushing for cooperation with Muggle law enforcement since I appointed you department head," Kingsley said evenly, "but I'm afraid that as it stands, these crimes are out of our purview."  
  
Bracing both hands on the desk's edge, Hermione leant forward and pinned Kingsley with a fierce, challenging glare. "Random people don't just up and off themselves in precisely the same fashion, Kingsley!" she contended hotly. "Where there's smoke, there's a dragon. I think we're looking at a series of anti-Muggle murders."  
  
At this, Kingsley's eyes narrowed, his broad shoulders squaring visibly. "Explain," he said in his calm, basso voice.  
  
"Someone's been kidnapping Muggles off the street in plain sight — maybe Apparating in and out quickly while under a Disillusionment Charm — and then forcing them to ingest poison with the Imperius Curse."  
  
"All right," Kingsley said after a moment's consideration. "You've got my permission to investigate. But once you've ruled out a magical perpetrator, you're to leave matters in Muggle hands, understood?"

 

* * *

  
  
Blue lights danced across a pale slash of cheekbone perched above the dark wing of an upturned coat collar. Hermione's heart stuttered, the air punching out of her lungs in a sharp, shocked gasp. Even from her position a few metres away at the perimeter of the scene, she recognised the face of Sherlock Holmes, heard the low, sinuous rumble of his voice as a yellow-jacketed paramedic led him out of the building and over to a waiting ambulance.  
  
Hermione turned with deliberate slowness. Her eyes swept to the mouth of the alley into which she had Apparated earlier. There was a car parked directly in front of it now: black, sleek, evidently not belonging to the police.  
  
 _Brilliant, another gauntlet to pass,_ she thought, jamming her hands into the pockets of her coat.  
  
For two minutes, she simply stood there, waiting for the officers milling about to afford her a chance to make a break. Sherlock drifted from the ambulance to a shortish man standing just inside the police tape barricade. The two exchanged a few hushed words, then began walking away from the scene, visibly struggling to suppress laughter.  
  
Everything looked clear. Hermione's feet beat a quick, straight line to the tape, her right hand flying out to grasp it.  
  
"Got what you needed, then?" a tart voice inquired from beside her without warning.  
  
Fighting down a hot flare of anger, Hermione swivelled her head around to meet the hard, suspicious glare of the curly-headed detective sergeant standing there with both arms crossed over her chest.  
  
"Yes," she bit out in answer. It wasn't a lie. One surreptitious charm cast on the interior of the cab when no one was looking was all it had taken for her to establish that the driver hadn't left a lingering magical signature.  
  
"Funny, Security Service getting involved in this business, innit?" the woman remarked pointedly.  
  
"That's not your concern," Hermione countered with feigned authority, yanking the police tape up over her head.  
  
By the time she neared the black car, Sherlock and his companion were walking away, leaving behind a woman with long brown hair and a man in a sharp suit leaning on a bamboo-handled umbrella as though it were a walking stick.  
Hermione's heart leapt into her throat. _Damn_ , she cursed inwardly, her mind becoming a panicked flurry of thought. She could recognise Mycroft Holmes from behind, knew his tall, straight-backed bearing instantly. Presently, he was talking to the woman at his side and watching his brother retreat, but in a few seconds, he would inevitably turn. Then his eyes would find her and she would be forced to confront all that she fled from four years ago.  
  
Heedless of the surrounding Muggles, she Apparated, the crushing dark oddly comforting as it closed around her.

 

* * *

  
  
"Please, I don't know anything about who's been using the warehouse, I swear. I've been out of work. I needed a job. When I saw what was in the boxes, I tried to back out, I did, but they had wands like you. They tortured me. _Please_."  
  
Hermione felt her insides twist at the way the Muggle man's soft Irish lilt quavered with abject fear. His eyes, uncannily black in an otherwise boyish, forgettable sort of face, pleaded with her from across the table.  
  
"Release him, Bletchley," she ordered, turning to look at the witch sitting beside her. "The only crime Mr. Moore here is demonstrably guilty of is taking a dodgy, under-the-table guard job, and it's not our place to enforce Muggle laws."  
  
"Do you honestly believe it's wise?" Bletchley asked sceptically.  
  
"What? You think we ought to force him to drink a quart of Veritaserum? Because we can, and he can't stop us?"  
  
The Obliviator narrowed her eyes. "This is about the Minister scuppering your Muggle-rights bill, isn't it?"  
  
Hermione rose from her seat abruptly. "If you would be so kind as to administer the Memory Charm," she spat, walking out of the room so that she wouldn't have to witness yet another pair of eyes go vacant.


	4. Chapter 4

The chair opposite Hermione slid out, the screech of metal on tile alarmingly loud in the small, empty café. Setting her teaspoon down on the rim of her saucer, she lifted her eyes, meeting Mycroft's gaze as he sat down across from her.  
  
"To what do I owe this unexpected honour?" he asked frostily.  
  
"A security matter that concerns both governments of the United Kingdom," Hermione replied.  
  
"Ah, not another civil war on your side, I hope. Things got terribly... _messy_...last time, didn't they?"  
  
"No, it's not that," Hermione said, struggling to maintain a healthy professional distance in her tone. "We've reason to believe there's currently a major wizarding crime syndicate operating within our borders. That's nothing new, of course, but unlike others, this one seems to have extensive ties to international Muggle crime networks."  
  
"I see," Mycroft said evenly, stirring cream into his tea with economic little flicks of his wrist.  
  
"Evidence suggests they've been laundering Muggle money through wizarding banks," Hermione continued. "Trafficking Muggle contraband through magical means. Muggle authorities can't detect their activity, and consequently they've become extremely powerful, their services highly sought after."  
  
"And how, pray, might this situation be addressed, our governments being what they are to each other?"  
  
"I hadn't thought that far ahead," Hermione admitted. "I just knew I couldn't stand by and do nothing. Couldn't wait for the Minister to finally decide it was serious enough to warrant dropping in on your Prime Minister."  
  
Mycroft said nothing in reply, just cocked a brow at her as he lifted his teacup and took a small, careful sip.  
  
"Look, I trust you completely," Hermione offered when the silence grew heavy.  
  
"But not so completely as to have been forthcoming with a certain... _delicate_...matter that arose some years ago."  
  
So it was really going to happen, then, the conversation she'd hoped never to have. Hermione wanted to tell him it was rich, being accused of lying by omission by a master of skirting the truth with cryptic, evasive statements, but instead she said, "I won't say I'm proud of every decision I've ever made, but the past's the past."  
  
"A pragmatic philosophy," he replied, a rueful edge creeping into the tempered public-school dispassion of his voice.  
  
Puffing out a weary sigh, Hermione let her gaze drop to her tea, long gone cold. She flattened her palms, pressed the tips of her fingers to her temples and slid them up slowly, feeling the shallow skin shift over the underlying bone.  
  
After a minute, she reached into the charm-concealed inner pocket of her coat, took out her slender black wallet. "You deserve to know," she said, extracting a moving photograph and handing it to Mycroft.  
  
Mycroft held the photo out in front of him lightly between the pinched thumb and forefinger of his right hand. His expression momentarily softened, eyes crinkling ever-so-slightly, lips twitching up into the faintest hint of a smile. Then his mouth firmed into a thin, stolid line, and his hand fell to rest on the tabletop.  
  
"Her name's Rose," Hermione told him. "Rose Ellen. And, yes, the umbrella goes everywhere, rain or shine."  
  
"There would never have been want of anything within my power to give," he remarked quietly.  
  
And there it was, the plain, hideous truth, bubbling up to fill the yawning lacunae of words carefully left unsaid. Hermione swallowed against the sudden dry knot in her throat. Because there was one thing, one thing alone in all the world that Ron could offer her and he could not, and it wasn't the guarded heart hidden in his chest.  
  
"I'm sorry," she said creakily, not even sure for what she was apologizing.  
  
Mycroft tucked the photo into the inner pocket of his suit jacket. "These things inevitably end, don't they?" he said, rising from his chair and retrieving his umbrella from where he'd left it leaning against the wall.  
  
Letting out a short, sharp breath, Hermione gave a stiff nod. "I suppose they do."  
  
"I shall do what I can to investigate the matter you've brought to my attention," he assured her, and then he was gone.

 

* * *

  
  
A week before Christmas, Hermione found a small, nondescript envelope mingled among her office post. Inside, there was a necklace with a little silver umbrella charm and a brief note written in tidy, efficient ballpoint script:  
  
 _A little trifle that caught my eye. Please see that it reaches a certain kindred spirit. All the best. -MH_  
  
At the end of the day, instead of Flooing home as usual, Hermione took the visitor's entrance up to the street. She walked for a block or so, until at last she spotted the bright, distinctive red of a Muggle post box.

 

* * *

  
  
"Look at them," Sherlock remarked with quiet disdain, watching the grieving couple embrace through the glass door at the end of the hall. "They all _care_ so much. Do you ever wonder if there's something wrong with us?"  
  
"All lives end. All hearts are broken." Mycroft's voice was toneless. "Caring is not an advantage, Sherlock."  
  
In the inner pocket of his suit jacket, over the calloused, weary thing that served as his heart, was an envelope. _Please restrict future correspondence to matters of a professional nature_ , the enclosed note read.

 

* * *

  
  
Drawing the patchwork quilt up to Hugo's chin with a soft, whispering rustle, Hermione smiled. Red lashes curved against freckled cheeks still round with baby fat, and his nose was the long, blunt line of a true Weasley.  
  
Every hour he spent awake was a riot of activity. His uncles certainly didn't help with the sort of toys they gave him. Rose was always chasing after him and trying to keep him from getting into mischief. Molly had taken to calling her Little Mother, but the name rankled Hermione, irritated her like a pebble stuck in her shoe. No, sometime after Hugo became more than a dull, burbling lump who reeked of milk, Rose had fallen into place as his keeper.  
  
Hugo was the sum of everything good about Ron and herself. And yet, when Hermione added them together in her mind, worked their marriage like a cold equation, she invariably came out with a negative.

 

* * *

  
  
Warm weight settled softly in Hermione's lap. Instinctively, she ran her fingers through the soft cheddar-coloured fur at the scruff of the cat's neck, feeling a low, contented purr vibrate across her thighs in response. A dull ache bloomed in her chest at the sudden memory of all of the times Crookshanks had done the same thing.  
  
"Last time I seen my brother was '94," said the tall, wiry woman sitting across from her and Harry. "Showed up in the middle of practice and said, 'Miss my baby sister play for Ireland? Not for the world, Saoirse.'"  
  
"I'm sure you're sick of hearing this, but you were brilliant," Harry told her brightly.  
  
Saoirse smiled, a small, rueful curl of her full lips. "When I was small, I hoped I'd end up playing with Seb," she said. "Built like a Beater, he was, but with a Seeker's eyes. Da took it poorly when he learned Mum is a witch, though. Divorce wasn't an option back then, so Mum took me, Da took Seb, and that was that — we grew up apart."  
  
"Do you know what happened to him?" Hermione asked, sliding two fingers up to stroke behind the cat's ears.  
  
"We wrote for a few years," Saoirse replied, idly fingering a stray lock of hair. "Da wouldn't let him go to Hogwarts. Thought he could take the wizard out of him somehow. Then there was something with a neighbour boy, something Da thought worse than being a wizard, and Seb was out on his own at fifteen."  
  
Harry leaned forward on the sofa. Twisting his hands together in front of him almost guiltily, he said, "We believe your brother's become head of a very powerful and very dangerous criminal network, Madam Moran."  
  
For half a minute, Saoirse was silent, her gaze wandering out the rain-beaded window to the verdant hill beyond. "I wish I could say Seb's not that man," she said at last, distant and sad, "but I've no idea what kind of man he is."

 

* * *

  
  
Hermione ducked. Searing white heat cracked over her head, leaving the sharp, acrid scent of singed hair in its wake. Heart hammering wildly, she slumped back against the crate, watching the spell cut a meteor-bright streak between the shadowed concrete pillars of the warehouse before it fizzled into nothingness. Blinking away the afterimage, she rolled her head to the left, meeting Ron's bloodied visage and giving him a look that said, _Cover me_.  
  
Nodding, he tightened his grip on his wand, twisted toward her to indicate his imminent intent to fire off a spell. They counted for a beat of three, then surged up in sympatico, sending a pair of Stunning Spells flying toward Moran.  
  
Moran threw out a thick, sinewy forearm, deflected the twin red jets with a crude slash of his wand. Hermione quickly shot off another Stunner, but Moran dropped down in time, taking cover behind the adjacent row of crates.  
  
"Whoops, try again!" a high, singsongy voice cried from somewhere out of sight.  
  
"Shut up!" Moran barked, loud enough to reach Hermione's ears.  
  
Readying her wand for another spell, Hermione cast a sidelong glance at Ron, caught his brief, answering nod. Though their marriage quietly broke down long ago, here, in the thick of battle, they were still a team.  
  
A few seconds later, Moran sprung up from behind the wall of crates, hauling another man to his feet along with him. "I swear you've a death wish, Jim," he growled, looping an arm around the smaller man's at the elbow. With a resounding _pop_ , he vanished, taking his companion with him, and Hermione and Ron's spells met empty air.

 

* * *

  
  
"It's known as the method of loci," Hermione said, absently thumbing the line of tacks studding the arm of the chair. "Basically works like Occlumency. You create a room inside your head to store memories in so you can't lose them."  
  
"Ah, yes, what Sherlock called his 'mind palace,'" Mycroft replied.  
  
Already using past tense, Hermione noted, mere hours after his brother's broken body was lifted off the pavement. How long had it taken her to start thinking of Fred in such terms? Lupin? Tonks? She couldn't remember. It had been so raw once, the terrible pain of loss, but time had worked against her feelings like the tide against a shore, gently grinding the sharp shards of her shattered psyche down into a fine and uniform sand.  
  
"I'm sorry," she told him numbly, not for the first time. "I should've known. But I never suspected a Muggle could resist a Memory Charm, never even stopped to think it could be Moriarty at the centre of the web, not Moran."  
  
"You are not the only one to have...miscalculated," Mycroft admitted quietly.  
  
There was something in his eyes, a heavy, haunted quality Hermione hadn't seen since the day Sherlock overdosed. It tugged at her heart. Made her want to fold him in her arms. Fall back into the soft sigh of silk sheets.  
  
His eyes caught hers, then, sharp and clear, and she saw that the shape of his thoughts mirrored her own. Watched him clutch the vain hope in his mind for a brief, selfish instant, then release it like a held breath.  
  
She'd closed the door on _them_ and whatever _they_ could have become. Slammed it shut good and hard and final. And now the unrealised possibility hung between them like a severed thread, invisible, but unmistakably there.  
  
"There's comfort in the knowledge I am not without family," Mycroft said at last. "It's John I worry for."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The dialogue in the scene in which Sherlock talks to Mycroft was borrowed from the _Sherlock_ episode "A Scandal in Belgravia."
> 
> Moran the female Chaser from the Irish National Quidditch team is a minor character in _Goblet of Fire_. Her first name isn't known from canon, so I chose one myself. Sebastian Moran is Moriarty's right-hand man in the original _Sherlock Holmes_ stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, and although he's never appeared in the BBC adaptation, he shows up quite regularly in fanfic.


	5. Chapter 5

A wistful smile formed on Hermione's lips as she watched Mycroft lift Rose and set her down in the carseat. There was a strange sort of forbearance in the way he tilted a stern look down at the five-year-old and said, "Still," to get her to stop fidgeting, a gentle efficiency in the way his hands worked to fasten the straps.  
  
A minute later, Mycroft's gaze met Hermione's over the roof of the car, and her hand froze on the passenger door handle. "There were ten years between Sherlock and I," he told her, answering the unvoiced question in her eyes.  
  
As she pulled open the car door and slid into the passenger seat, she recalled the eager but bumbling new father that Ron had been in those first few giddy, frenetic weeks after they'd brought Rose home from St. Mungo's. How he'd overheated her bottle with miscast Warming Charms and poked her with the nappy pin when he changed her. Bill, on the other hand, had taken to fatherhood like a kelpie to water when Victoire arrived; Bill, the oldest of Molly and Arthur's brood, who'd grown up with five younger brothers and a younger sister underfoot. It struck her, then, how Mycroft spoke freely about his mother, but had only mentioned his father once in passing.  
  
"I never knew," she said, turning her head to the right to look at Mycroft. "You practically raised him, didn't you?"  
  
"Not practically," Mycroft said, pushing his key into the ignition with a muted _click_.  
  
"Is this a flying car like Granddad Weasley used to have?" Rose asked from the backseat suddenly.  
  
"No," Hermione replied gently, twisting around as much as her seatbelt would allow. "It's not a magic car, sweetheart. And the lady we're going to visit is a Muggle, but she doesn't know about our world like Grandma and Grandpa Granger or Mr. Holmes do, so you mustn't talk about magic things while we're there."  
  
Rose's face scrunched up questioningly. "Why do some Muggles know about magic, Mummy?"  
  
"Because they've got a family member who's a witch or wizard, usually," Hermione said.  
  
"But if they can know the secret, why can't all Muggles?" the little girl pressed.  
  
"It's complicated," Hermione stated.  
  
"If the lady's one of the Muggles who's not allowed to know about magic, why are we going to see her, Mummy? Why couldn't we go with Hugo and Daddy to see Uncle Charlie and his dragons instead?"  
  
At this, Mycroft turned around, offering Rose a small, cryptic smile. "She's my mother," he explained. "She's been in rather ill spirits since my brother's...abrupt departure...and I thought she might do well with company."  
  
"Where did your brother go?" Rose inquired innocently.  
  
"Heaven, love," Hermione hastily answered, flicking an apologetic glance over at Mycroft.  
  
"You mean he died?"  
  
Mycroft's lips momentarily drew taut, but Hermione knew it was out of repressed grief, not anger. "Yes."  
  
"Do Muggles go to the same heaven as witches and wizards?"  
  
"I don't see why they wouldn't," Hermione said, reaching up to do her seatbelt as Mycroft started the engine.

 

* * *

  
  
Hermione's footsteps fell soundlessly on the carpeted floor of the hallway. The sitting room door was still slightly ajar. Through the crack, she saw the profile of Mrs. Holmes seated on the sofa, mouth set and hair a hard steel-grey wave. Her spindly fingers were carding through the mass of coppery curls crowning the small head asleep on her lap.  
  
"A cuckoo in the nest needn't be found out, Mycroft," she said, low, throaty voice unfurling like smoke.  
  
Heart juddering in her chest, Hermione jerked away from the door, flattening against the slice of wall between the door frame and the pedestal displaying a blue-and-white-patterned antique Chinese vase.  
  
"Perhaps," Mycroft remarked. "But what of a young cuckoo clever enough to deduce its own nature?"  
  
There was a tension-fraught pause. Ringed fingers closed around a heavy silver necklace with an audible _clack_. "Then maybe it ought to know the wisdom of keeping its little beak shut," Mrs. Holmes replied.  
  
"Hiring a violin instructor with precisely the same brown fleck in his eye as your son? Hardly wise, was it?"  
  
"You also knew about Henri, Mycroft, and yet you resisted gleefully sharing that knowledge during Christmas dinner."  
  
"I was sixteen." Quiet anger underscored the practiced calm of Mycroft's voice. "Sherlock was _six_."  
  
The full import of the exchange took a moment to gel inside of Hermione's mind. When it did, she hissed in an angry, shocked breath, her fingernails digging reflexively into the wallpaper where her hands were braced against the wall. _If worse comes to worse and Ron finds out, I won't hold it against Rose_ , she promised herself silently.  
  
Then, smoothing the grimace from her face, she reentered the sitting room and resumed her place beside Mycroft.

 

* * *

  
  
Warm summer air gusted against Hermione's cheek from the rolled-down car window. The moon was high in the dark, cloudless sky, a pregnant orb spilling milky-silver light across the pastoral landscape blurring past. Allowing her eyes to slip shut, she sucked in a long, shuddery breath and reached up to free her tied-back hair.  
  
She heard Mycroft's sharp, indrawn hiss as her bushy mane sprung loose, whipping against her face in the breeze. Could almost see his long-fingered hands tighten involuntarily around the steering wheel.  
  
 _His hands_. How she missed his hands. Unhurried and clever and always so assured. Ron's hands, she loved, too: large and warm with thick, eager fingers, at the end of long gangly arms covered in a dense spill of freckles. Maybe in another lifetime she could stay suspended between both of their hands forever, in perfect, blissful equilibrium.  
  
"Did I ever tell you about Sherlock's first official case?" Mycroft asked abruptly, sensing the path of her thoughts.  
  
Hermione's eyes snapped open. She pivoted her head around to look at Mycroft. "No."  
  
"It was during your war," he said, his eyes fixed firmly on the road. "A four-year-old girl found in a ditch in rural Kent. 'Mudblood' had been carved into her arm, but there was no identifiable cause of death, not even to Sherlock's eyes."  
  
Head falling back against the headrest, Hermione swallowed, fighting down a sudden, stinging rush of bile.  
  
"I was forced to put an end to his prying," Mycroft continued. "Wouldn't do to have Obliviators meddling with his brain. He wasn't pleased, naturally. Flew into a terrible, childish rage. But he had his studies and...certain other pursuits...to divert him, though I knew it continued to trouble him, the unsolved mystery and the want of justice."  
  
"She's dead, the woman who did it," Hermione said softly. "My mother-in-law killed her in a duel."  
  
"I must remember never to cross your mother-in-law," Mycroft rejoined, lips twitching up into a tight smile.  
  
Hermione snorted out a laugh. "You already have. She just doesn't know it."  
  
"Ah, yes," he said, in that crisp, droll tone Hermione loved and loathed by turns, "and she needn't ever learn."  
  
"No," she confirmed.  
  
They drove on in silence for another kilometre. At last, Hermione felt a nagging maternal agitation, and turned to check Rose, still asleep in her carseat, umbrella clutched in her hand and head drooping heavily like a wilted flower.  
  
"I'm afraid it isn't in my nature," Mycroft remarked distantly, "ceding watch over such a vitally important thing."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first time I watched _Sherlock_ , it struck me that Mark Gatiss and Benedict Cumberbatch don't bear a very strong resemblance, and so it's since become my personal headcanon that Mycroft and Sherlock are secretly half-brothers.


	6. Chapter 6

The muted crackle of an indeterminate Christmas song poured from the ancient speakers overhead. In the next aisle over, a baby was shrieking, leaving Hermione feeling as if she was down to her last raw, frazzled nerve.  
  
"I'm bored, Mum," Hugo whined, climbing up to perch on the end of the shopping cart.  
  
With an eye-roll and a soft, irritated cluck, Rose hooked her hands under her brother's armpits and hauled him down.  
  
"I've still got to find gifts for Grandpa and Grandma Granger," Hermione said. "Why don't you go look at the toys?"  
  
"But Muggle toys don't _do_ anything!" Hugo protested loudly.  
  
"Keep your voice down!" Rose scolded. "And of course their toys do things, just not the same things as our toys."  
  
Hermione nodded at her daughter, a small, proud smile curving her lips. She watched the girl drag her brother off, then turned to face the shelf, starring blankly at the row of candles as if she expected the right one to jump out at her.  
  
"A bit maddening, isn't it, buying gifts?" a gently exasperated voice remarked from beside her a minute later.  
  
Turning around, Hermione saw a man with sandy-brown hair shot through with silver and a garish, seasonal jumper. A memory twitched loose deep inside her brain. She knew this man. Why couldn't she put a name to his face?  
  
"John Watson," the man supplied, holding out his left hand. "We met at that, um, thing, for Sherlock."  
  
As she took hold of his hand, she noted the plain, silver band on his fourth finger. Things had evidently patched up well despite the fact that Sherlock's not-funeral was still too touchy of a subject for him to acknowledge verbally.  
  
After a brief shake, Hermione pulled her hand away, immediately lifting it to gesture vaguely at the shelves of stock. "I'm here shopping for my parents," she explained, offering John a tentative sort of smile. "My dad's going to be easy. He reads voraciously. Pretty much anything from the book aisle will do. But Mum...Mum's impossible."  
  
John laughed, a soft, breathy sound. "Sherlock works out what you've got him the second you give it to him."  
  
"He did that to me at his birthday do about ten years ago. 'Sterling silver pen. _Dull_.'"  
  
John let out another laugh, opening his mouth with the apparent intent to say something, but at that moment Hermione heard the thunder of two pairs of feet bounding down the aisle toward her.  
  
"Mum, look what I found!" Hugo cried, dashing in front of Hermione and thrusting a brightly-coloured box in her face.  
  
Hermione shot John an apologetic look and then tilted her gaze down at the excited face of her son.

 

* * *

  
  
Mr. Ollivander extended a dark length of wood across the counter in his gnarled hands. "Elm, phoenix feather core, ten-and-three-quarter inches, quite rigid, but not without a certain adaptability," he said in a rasping, time-worn voice.  
  
Rose wrinkled her long, pointed nose as she took the wand, turning it over in her hands scrutinously.  
  
"How do you expect it to trust you, if you will not trust it, Miss Weasley?" he asked gently.  
  
Lifting her gaze, Rose met the elderly wandmaker's large, silver-grey eyes. "None of the others have worked."  
  
"Ah, yes, the wand I sold your mother began emitting sparks the instant she walked through the door," he told her. "Curious trait of vine wands. I've only witnessed it twice in all my years. But between you, I, and the wall, my dear, I've always found that the most discriminating wands choose the most interesting wizards."  
  
Grasping the wand in her right hand, Rose gave it a quick, economic flick. Blue-white sparks instantly erupted from the wand's tip, fell to the floor in a bright, fizzing shower that filled the shop's interior with the scent of ozone.  
  
"Yes, yes, that's it!" Mr. Ollivander exclaimed hoarsely. "What did I tell you, child?"  
  
With a small, satisfied smile, Rose reached into her pocket and deposited a handful of Galleons on the counter.

 

* * *

  
  
With a piercing wail of its whistle, the Hogwarts Express rounded a corner and disappeared from sight, leaving only the bleary, shimmering haze of a quickly-evaporating trail of engine steam in its wake.  
  
Hermione swallowed. Her throat suddenly felt dry and constricted. In her chest, her heart, which seemed to have somehow swollen to double its normal size with elation and pride, was now shrivelling like a deflating balloon. She blinked rapidly to shatter the tears she could feel pulling together at the corners of her eyes.  
  
Ron slung an arm over her shoulders affectionately. "Our little Rosie, all grown up," he remarked.  
  
It was quiet and rueful, uncharacteristically so, betraying the fact that the almost-bereavement of Rose's departure harrowed his heart as terribly as it did at hers, and yet she couldn't shake the unease churning low in her gut. Couldn't get over the fact that, in some small measure, he had rejected three-fourths of the people Rose could be with his flippant threat to disown her should the Sorting Hat place her anywhere other than Gryffindor. Had slighted the sum of Rose's true heritage with a single Confundus Charm aimed at a hapless Muggle driving instructor (and he assumed she wouldn't _hear_ when he leant in and confessed the deed to Harry in a conspiratorial whisper).  
  
She couldn't abide it. Not here. Not today. Not at the point in space-time at which all of her regrets intersected.  
  
"Not your Rose," she murmured, just loud enough to know that she wasn't saying the words in her head.  
  
She registered the instant understanding dawned in Ron's mind in the abrupt stiffening of his arm. Then his large, warm palm slid limply down her back like dead slug, only to snap back into place when Harry turned toward him.  
  
Ron managed to hold himself together long enough to suggest that Hugo might enjoy sleeping over at the Potters. Long enough to pass through the magical barrier separating Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters from the rest of King's Cross station and stalk out to the rented blue saloon waiting in a nearby car park.  
  
Once they were inside the vehicle, he cracked open like a ship running aground, knuckles turning white as he gripped the steering wheel and face flushing an ugly shade of red as he fought to take in enough air between tearless sobs.  
  
"You don't get to say she isn't mine," he croaked at her brokenly. "Even...even if she's not really...she's still my Rosie. _My Rosie_. My little girl. Nothing in the world could ever change that. Do you hear me? Nothing!"  
  
Hermione just sat there, silent and numb, letting his mingled anger and sorrow wash over her like a wave.  
  
"You think I never suspected there was someone else? Your bloody Patronus changed! That hurt, it did. But then I hurt you, that night in the tent, when I did a bunk, and I thought maybe you just needed time to sort things out too."  
  
"I'm sorry," Hermione said hollowly, her voice sounding alien and strange to her ears.  
  
"Who was it?" Ron demanded.  
  
"He's a good man," she answered, a little more defensively than intended. "You're both good men."  
  
"I don't care what kind of bloke he is, Hermione!" Ron yelled, fingers clenching tighter around the steering wheel. "Right now I want to march into whatever sodding department he works in and hex his bollocks off!"  
  
"He doesn't work for the Ministry. He works for the other British government. The Queen's government."  
  
It took a moment for Ron to fully absorb the meaning of her words. "You mean...a Muggle...you...with a _Muggle?_ "  
  
Hermione pinned her husband with a withering glare. "Would a wizard have made it less wrong?"  
  
For a moment, Ron's mouth worked open and shut bewilderedly, until at last he conceded, "No, it wouldn't have."

 

* * *

  
  
Soft tinkling raps broke the silence hanging heavily in the kitchen. Forcing herself out of her chair, Hermione padded over to the window and flung it open, allowing a tiny powderpuff of an owl to rush into the room in a feathery blur. With a chirruping hoot, the bird deposited the letter in its talons on top of the table, then flew back out.  
  
Hermione sat down and tore open the envelope. Ron watched her read from across the table, both hands wrapped around his cup of tea, an expression somewhere between excitement and apprehension on his face.  
  
"Slytherin," Hermione said a minute later. "She says she's sorry. Albus is in Ravenclaw with Scorpius Malfoy."  
  
Ron let out a loud guffaw. "Scorpius Malfoy's not in Slytherin? His father must be having kittens."  
  
"Too bad it wasn't Gryffindor," Hermione said, chuckling softly around a small, brittle smile.  
  
"I didn't mean what I said earlier, Hermione, about disowning Rose," Ron told her quietly. "It was a stupid joke. No matter what house she's in or what she does with her life, she'll always be our Rosie, right?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The reference Ollivander makes to a unique trait displayed by vine-wood wands is based on information from Pottermore.


	7. Chapter 7

The knife hit the cutting board with muted _thunk_. Upset carrot slices flew onto the countertop. "You _what?_ " Hermione demanded, her shaking hand clamping shut into a fist in the sudden absence of the knife's handle. She huffed out an angry, bullish snort, feeling an overwhelming urge to punch something, to snap something in half.  
  
"I told Harry," Ron repeated thickly, half-peeled potato and paring knife held aloft in his shock-stilled hands.  
  
"This was supposed to stay between us, Ron!" Hermione said, flattening both palms against the counter.  
  
Ron set the potato and knife down. Nervously shifted from one foot to the other. "Well, he's my best mate, you know."  
  
"And he's going to tell Ginny, who's going to tell your mother, who's...Merlin, Ron, you clot, you absolute clot!"

 

* * *

  
  
A red circle flared briefly in the wide-open darkness of the night as Mycroft took a drag of his cigarette. Blowing a billow of smoke into the brisk autumn air, he cast a sidelong glance toward the distant, golden glow of the Burrow. "Rather a precarious structure in which to raise seven children, isn't it?" he remarked.  
  
"Home is what you make it," Hermione countered softly.  
  
Mycroft puffed out another wafting cloud of smoke. "Ah, yes, I'd forgotten sentiment puts solid construction to shame."  
  
"Sorry my mother-in-law lost her temper like that. It's just that family's the most important thing to her."  
  
"This wasn't a social call, I assure you," he said, dropping his cigarette to the ground and grinding it out with his shoe. "I merely wished to allay certain...erroneous reports...that've been circulating amongst your relations."  
  
Hermione pulled the open halves of her coat together to stave off the cold. "I know."  
  
"I've been informed that family is all we have in the end. Naturally, I opened the trust fund the day after our meeting in the café, but I confess it took longer to fully appreciate the significance of its intended beneficiary."  
  
"If I could go back, Mycroft, I'd do everything differently. Keeping you out of Rose's life was selfish and cruel."  
  
"It was also wise," Mycroft stated evenly. "There are circles in which I am not, shall we say, _popular_." He closed his eyes a beat, barely more than a blink, but Hermione knew how to read distress in the cipher of his face. "I had the most vivid dream once, that Moriarty discovered her existence, used her as leverage."  
  
Hermione lifted a hand and ran it down his arm, the rough, heavy wool of his overcoat rasping against her palm. "We're like a palimpsest, aren't we?" she said thoughtfully, stroking just above his wrist with the pad of her thumb. "We overwrite each other. Same ambitions, same duties, same fears. But we live in different worlds."  
  
Mycroft twisted his wrist, caged Hermione's hand in a glancing, spectral grip. "The world can always be...adjusted."  
  
Hermione held Mycroft's gaze for a long moment. Then she swallowed, shook her head, and let her hand fall away. "I suppose we should tell Rose the truth, before she hears it from someone else," she suggested.  
  
"I doubt that shall be necessary," Mycroft averred. "I imagine she long ago deduced her true parentage."  
  
Hermione jerked her head in the direction of the Burrow. "We ought to head back," she said. "Arthur's probably calmed Molly down by now and they'll be getting ideas if we stay out here any longer."

 

* * *

  
  
"It's not her nappy," Sherlock declared, dark head bent over his microscope. "Wrong pitch."  
  
John let out a sharp, long-suffering sigh, shifted the wailing infant over to his good shoulder. Her tiny round chin slotted perfectly into place between two raised bands of his soft moss-green cable-knit jumper. "Jesus Christ, Sherlock, you think I can't already tell that with Hattie's bloody nappy inches from my nose?"  
  
"You'd best go wake Molly," Sherlock told him, low and even.  
  
From the living room, there came a dull clatter and a soft, shocked cry. Both men looked to where their son was lying on the floor between their armchairs, activity book bearing the long, yellow wound of an overzealous crayon slash and brown eyes staring guiltily at the overturned sippy cup glugging out apple juice onto the hearthrug.  
  
"It's okay, Hamish," John said gently, rushing into the living room. Instinctively cupping his palm around the baby's precociously full head of black, curling hair, he lowered himself onto his knees at the boy's side.  
  
Sherlock's stool scraped against the kitchen floor. "I'll deal with it," he snapped, grabbing a tea towel off the counter.  
  
"M'sorry, Daddy," Hamish mumbled, tilting his sandy-haired head up to look at John.  
  
Suddenly, the sippy cup righted itself, the spilled juice rising out of the rug and flowing back into its spout in a stream.  
  
"Sherlock, did you see that?" John gasped. The baby had gone quiet in his arms. "Tell me I'm not mad."  
  
The tea towel hung limply from Sherlock's hand where he stood over John's kneeling form. " _No_ ," he ground out firmly. "No, I didn't see anything, John. Neither of us saw anything. It was just a trick of the eyes."

 

* * *

  
  
Rising from the squashy red armchair, Hermione cast a sidelong glance to where Mycroft was seated in the adjacent chrome-framed, black leather armchair, plunging her hand into the deep pocket of her camel raincoat. He gave her an almost imperceptible nod of assent, and her fingers closed around her wand, drew it out in a slow, deliberate motion.  
  
Holding the wand at ready, she let her gaze quickly sweep over the faces of the three people rowed on the sofa on the other side of the coffee table, Sherlock and John and the woman they'd introduced as Molly Hooper. Then she pointed her wand at a pencil lying beside a half-completed newspaper crossword puzzle on the coffee table, counted for a beat of three, and incanted, " _Wingardium Leviosa_ ," with an economic little swish and flick. The pencil floated up, hung in mid-air, as if suspended from the ceiling by an unseen thread of magical force.  
  
John blinked a few times in rapid succession, swiped his tongue across his lower lip, then shot a look at Sherlock. "So, what's your rational assessment?" he asked wryly. "Sleight of hand? Hallucinogens slipped in our tea?"  
  
Sherlock's chin had tipped back off of his steepled fingers. His head turned calmly to meet John's dark blue eyes. "Once you've ruled out the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable —"  
  
"You mean you were _wrong_ ," John interjected, quiet but firm.  
  
Hermione stashed her wand away and fell back into the red armchair. The pencil hit the coffee table with a clatter.  
  
Molly let out a bubbling, bemused laugh. "My son's a wizard. An actual wizard. That's just...I don't know... _wow_.”  
  
Sherlock's gaze abruptly snapped to Hermione. "At what age does magical ability typically manifest?"  
  
"Usually between three and seven, but sometimes as early as infancy," Hermione answered.  
  
At this, Sherlock's brow furrowed, his mouth compacting into a hard line. John caught his gaze. In the space of only a few seconds, an unspoken conversion seemed to pass between them, and Sherlock visibly relaxed.

 

* * *

  
  
Bright summer sun spilled across the pages of the novel cracked open on the table in front of Hermione. Her hand hovered over to the top right corner of the book, poised to flip to the next page, then suddenly stilled. The tendons on the back of her hand stood out in modest relief and the skin around her second knuckles was slightly loose. _I'm getting old_ , she thought bemusedly, wiggling her fingers and watching the tendons flex like struck piano strings.  
  
Letting her hand drop to the table, Hermione looked to where her fifteen-year-old daughter was seated across from her, head bent over a potions textbook, sweat-damp auburn curls piled into a loose ponytail on the top of her head. Her fleshy, freckled arms were milk-pale in her sleeveless white sundress, while just outside the glass door of the sunroom her nut-brown brother was whizzing about on his Nimbus 6000, playing Chaser to his father's Keeper.  
  
"So," Hermione broached, keeping her voice light and conversational, "Al tells me Scorpius fancies you."  
  
Rose's head snapped up. "Oh?" she said, in the same bland, disinterested tone she met talk of the weather.  
  
"Apparently, he's asking for a new owl, as he's convinced his current one hasn't been delivering his letters to you."  
  
"Maybe it's on strike," Rose sniffed. "You fought for laws to protect house-elves from cruel treatment. I say we create new laws to protect owls from the cruelty of having to carry soppy poems written by moony teenage boys."  
  
"Your dad's starting to feel cheated, you know," Hermione rejoined with a lopsided smile. "Feels he's entitled to at least one dramatic heartbreak, so he can have his little girl cry on his shoulder, hex whatever prat did her wrong."  
  
Rose shrugged her sloping shoulders. "My father thinks I've got my priorities straight."  
  
"Deep down, your father wants the same things as your dad, whatever his pronouncements on sentiment."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Molly was enlisted as the mother of Hamish and Hattie because I didn't want to relegate this role to an anonymous surrogate. Whether Sherlock, John, and Molly represent a threesome or a gay couple and a very close friend is up to you.


	8. Chapter 8

Rose's feet cut a frenetic back-and-forth path in front of the fire crackling in the hearth. She stopped short suddenly, rested her right hand on the white marble mantelpiece, her eyes fixed on an indeterminate point in space. Half a minute later, she let out a strangled scoff and wrenched her hand back to her side, then resumed her pacing.  
  
China clinked against china as Mycroft set his cup back in its saucer. "Do mind the carpet. It was Mummy's favourite."  
  
"So was a cat with bladder issues, obviously," Rose shot back, casting a pointed look down at the Persian rug. Irregular patches of clean, bright colour stood out against the dull, dust-muted colour of the whole.  
  
"Rose, sit down," Hermione ordered, leaning forward to set her teacup on the coffee table.  
  
Rose huffed indignantly and flopped down on an armchair beside the sofa, curling in on herself like a frightened spider, her knees drawing up toward her chest and her stockinged feet flattening against the seat cushion.  
  
"You cannot expect change to occur instantaneously," Mycroft told her sternly.  
  
"You know why Gaia van der Aart's report landed on my desk?" Rose challenged. "Because the Ministry doesn't _care_. They couldn't bury it outright. Oh, no. So they fobbed it off on a poor little junior clerk in the Muggle Liaison Office."  
  
Hermione reached across the gap between the sofa and the armchair to stroke Rose's forearm. Rose flinched away from the touch, hunching in closer to her knees, which served to pull her pudgy form into an even tighter ball.  
  
"I understand how you feel," Hermione said, trying to keep her voice even and sympathetic.  
  
"No, you _don't_ ," Rose spat savagely. "You're such a hypocrite. Oh, sure, you got a tepid Muggle-rights law passed, but at the end of the day, you want to keep living in a cosy little bubble like the rest of the wizardkind. Muggles are ruining the environment with their unsustainable way of life, and we're taking clean, renewable energy for granted."  
  
Hermione felt a sudden wet prickle at the corners of her eyes. She pressed her lips together to keep them from quivering, twisted her clasped hands and drew a sharp, steadying breath through her nose. Mycroft shifted closer with the whisper of pinstriped wool on embroidered upholstery, the long, solid warmth of his body reassuring her.  
  
"To be so young and idealistic," he said, each crisply-enunciated syllable as sharp as a dagger-point.  
  
"I'm being _pragmatic_ ," Rose insisted. "If Muggles wreck the planet, they wreck it for wizards and witches, too."  
  
Mycroft's lips curved, a taut, mirthless not-smile. "If only the world were so simple. So uncomplicated. But I assure you that the consequences of lifting the Statute of Secrecy would be equally... _unpleasant_...on both sides."  
  
Anger flashed in Rose's blue-grey eyes. Her legs unfurled and she sprung out of the chair. Stomping over to the fireplace, she shoved her feet into her shoes, then grabbed a handful of Floo powder from the dish on the mantel. Orange flame turned green as the powder landed on the hearth with a cascade of sizzling pops. "My flat!" she barked, and was gone, leaving Hermione feeling as if a tiny piece of her heart had suddenly blinked out of existence.

 

* * *

  
  
The steady chug of the printing press made a deep sense of satisfaction bloom inside Rose's chest. Finally shuttering the _Quibbler_ after fifty years, but still a friend to underdogs, Mr. Lovegood had let her have it for almost nothing.  
  
She allowed her gaze to drift over to where Scorpius was diligently magicking loose pages together into pamphlets. His white-blond fringe hung down in front of his pale, fine-boned face. It was odd, really, how his parents were so circumspect, and yet his face was always an open tableau of every emotion that spilled out of his overflowing heart. Whenever she looked at him, his soft grey eyes lit up, like a starving dog having a piece of meat waved in its face. One day, she would have to dash his hopes, but right now she needed his deep pockets and eagerness to please. The money she got from her trust was just enough to pay the rent on her tiny flat and this office.  
  
Suddenly, the bell above the door at the top of the stairs tinkled, and a shaft of sunlight cut into the basement space. Slow plodding footfalls sounded on the steps, and then a bald, hunched figure appeared at the bottom.  
  
"Granddad," Rose greeted, her heart leaping with an unbidden pang of fondness.  
  
"Hello, Rosie," Arthur returned warmly, adjusting the grocery-laden paper bag in his arms as he walked over to her. "Our very own Carlotta Pinkstone. How're things going? Any new members since I last popped in?"  
  
"No," Rose replied, slumping down on the nearest stool. "Still just the two of us against the rest of the world."  
  
Cans clattered together loudly as Arthur set the paper bag down on the worktable and sat on an adjacent stool. "Make that three," he declared with a smile. "I've thought about it, Rosie, and it's good, what you're trying to do. It'll mean the change of everything we know, but change isn't something to fear, is it?"  
  
Rose picked up a stray button labelled "Repeal the Statute of Secrecy!" and set it down in her grandfather's palm.  
  
"Hugo's been made Gryffindor captain," Arthur told her conversationally, turning the pin over in his knobbled fingers. "I came across a Muggle device called an EyePhone, but no matter how much I stare at it, I can't get it to work."  
  
"I've missed you," Rose confessed, hating the way her voice hitched with emotion.  
  
Arthur laid a hand on her shoulder and gave it a light squeeze. "You're welcome home any time, Rosie."  
  
Rose shook her head. Her auburn curls, lacquered with grease from too many days unwashed, bounced sluggishly.  
  
"I brought some proper food," Arthur said. "Can't have you and Scorpius living off Wand-Heat Instant Noodles."  
  
"Scorpius?" Rose let out a sardonic snort. "Scorpius has never wanted for anything in his entire life."  
  
A stricken look suddenly crossed Arthur's wizened visage. Leaning in closer to her and lowering his voice to a reedy whisper, so as not to be overheard by Scorpius, he said, "You really don't know, do you?"  
  
"Know what?" Rose asked, betraying a measure of apprehension.  
  
"The Malfoys disowned him," Arthur informed her. "Learned he was supporting your cause and completely cut him off. Al says he's been brewing potions to make ends meet. Be kind to him, Rosie. You're all he's got right now."

 

* * *

  
  
"Run that by me again," John demanded, setting his coffee down on the table beside a partially-unfolded map. In the watery early morning light filtering into the tiny kitchen of the cottage, the bags under his eyes seemed darker, the furrows on his brow deeper, and the military-neat crop of his hair without any identifiable colour.  
  
Sherlock's thumbs stilled on the tiny keyboard of his mobile. His eyes flicked up to meet John's accusatory glare. "Working holiday," he said, the words rolling giddily off of his tongue.  
  
John blinked. Swallowed. Blinked again. "Right. Working holiday. _Jesus Christ_."  
  
"Problem?"  
  
"Oh, I don't know, maybe that I thought we were finally getting one bloody fucking proper holiday. Get out of London. Enjoy the country. Just you, me, our kids. Normal family stuff. No corpses or explosions or madmen with guns."  
  
Sherlock swept a hand loosely toward the grey glowing square of the lace-curtained window over the kitchen sink. Toward the indistinct notion of an outside world. "You can still do that," he said. "Walk Hamish out to the woods. Let him fly around a bit on that broom-thing. Get some of that fresh air I hear is so invigorating for children."  
  
"And Hattie?" John asked.  
  
"Harriet will accompany me into town," Sherlock answered simply.  
  
"To a crime scene?" John gawped, jaw flexing, fingers curling into fists. "Jesus, Sherlock, she's _five!_ "  
  
"Lestrade says it looks like a poisoning. Nothing too ghastly. Sounds dull, frankly. Harriet needn't go beyond the tape. One of the less incompetent officers can mind her. Try earning their paycheque for a change."  
  
"Why can't she come along with Hamish? Be a kid. Do kid things. Or do you actually like being a cruel dick?"  
  
Eyes narrowing, Sherlock unrounded his shoulders and straightened his back, emphasising their height difference. "You think that would be kind?” he asked, pitching his voice low and deadly, like the rumble of distant thunder. "Making her stand there, idle and _degraded_ , while her brother whizzed about freely over her head?"  
  
John's expression softened. He cupped his hands over Sherlock's where they were resting on the table. Let one thumb trace gently around the bony knob of a wrist until the tension began bleeding out of Sherlock's frame.  
  
"There's still time, you know," he said after what seemed like a small eternity of silence.  
  
"She should've shown some sign by now, John," Sherlock said, sounding more resigned than he had in a long time.  
  
"Mycroft had one, didn't he? That's hope, right there. Proves that wizard genes run in the Holmes family."  
  
"It doesn't prove they ran in the family of my mother's French lover."  
  
"What?" John blinked, swallowed against the sudden, dry lump in his throat. " _Oh_."  
  
"Perhaps it would be best to prepare Hamish and Harriet for the inevitable separation they'll face."  
  
"No," John said, giving his head a short, sharp shake. "None of this mine and yours. They're _ours_ , understand?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Just the two of us against the rest of the world" is a small homage to the soon-to-air series three.
> 
> Carlotta Pinkstone is a canonical character mentioned on the Wizard of the Month feature that used to be on JKR's official site. She's famous for her (radical by wizarding standards) activism against the Statute of Secrecy. This is, to my knowledge, the only reference to wizarding opposition to the Statute of Secrecy in the entire _Harry Potter_ canon.


	9. Chapter 9

The cool, fresh scent of rain filtered through the cracked-open window, the curtains fluttering faintly in the breeze. Rose flipped to the next page of the book in her hands. Shimmied back even closer to the headboard, cocked her head down to better direct the clean, blue-white light emanating from the tip of the wand tucked behind her ear.  
  
The mattress dipped and groaned as Scorpius shifted restlessly beside her.  
  
"Do you want me to put it out?" Rose asked quietly.  
  
"S'okay," he murmured, in that muzzy, sleep-slurred way she found strangely charming.  
  
" _Nox_ ," she said anyway, plucking the wand from behind her ear and setting it on the bedside table with the book. She let herself slide down the headboard, rolled onto her side, so that she was lying face to face with Scorpius in the dark.  
  
"You smell nice," he remarked, draping an arm over her flank. "Like being under an umbrella in the rain."  
  
Rose chuckled lightly. "You're shite at trying to tell me what you think I want to hear, Scor. Utter and complete shite."  
  
"It's the truth, though," he insisted, his wandering palm finding the small of her back.  
   
Rose snuggled in closer to him. "I wonder what the weather's going to be like in Reykjavik next week."  
  
"Ice, probably," suggested Scorpius. "Volcanoes."  
  
"Volcanoes aren't a type of weather. Merlin, you're dafter than my Aunt Luna, sometimes."  
  
Scorpius nuzzled his nose into her neck, whispered, "The Icelandic Ministry's going to listen us. I just know it."  


 

* * *

  
  
John stopped to accept a leaflet from the woman with straggly dark blonde hair standing outside the apothecary. He heard Sherlock snort derisively at his side, felt the concerned tug of Hamish's hand on the sleeve of his jacket, but years of politely accepting leaflets (only to toss them in the bin a block later) had hard-wired the behaviour into him.  
  
 _Stop Habitat Loss: Repeal the Statute of Secrecy_ , implored silver text above a photograph of a dragon.  
  
 _Dragons_ , John thought as the beast in the picture raised its head to release a soundless roar. _Actual dragons_. Stunned bemusement bubbled up from within his chest, broke free of him in a high, wheezy titter.  
  
"Oh, you're a Muggle, aren't you?" the woman noted in an aloof, oddly matter-of-fact way.  
  
"Um, yeah," John blurted, a little awkwardly, head snapping up to meet the woman's too-pale gaze. "Want this back?"  
  
"It's all right," replied the woman. "You didn't know about them until just now, did you? That's the problem. They're dying out because their habitat is shrinking, and they can't find enough food, and Muggles aren't noticing. Muggles rarely seem to notice."  
  
John saw Sherlock bristle in his peripheral vision, sensed dark, coiling indignation rolling off of him like an aura. He wanted to reach out, touch his elbow, but there was a leaflet in his left hand and a book-laden cauldron in the other.  
  
"You witnessed your mother's accidental death as a child," Sherlock told the woman. "Your friends all settled down before you, had their little families, while you were swanning off to parts of the world they'd never dream of going. You've got twins now, but no other living relations, and you fear that they're growing up as alone as you did."  
  
John waited for the drawn wand, the nasty spell, but instead the woman just offered Sherlock a mild, dreamy smile. "Oh, did I tell you all that without speaking?" she asked, her voice suffused with quiet curiosity.  
  
"You're the second person in history he hasn't cheesed off with that little talent," John said.  
  
"You were the first, weren't you?" the woman said, giving John a meaningful look.  
  
John hastily stuffed the leaflet between two books in the cauldron. "John Watson," he said, extending his hand.  
  
"Luna Lovegood," the woman returned, her small hand clasping John's.  


 

* * *

  
  
Sherlock's face scrunched into a moue of distaste as he skimmed the scrawly handwriting on the letter in his hands. "'Hufflepuff?'" he mouthed, his voice dripping with contempt. "It sounds like a sugary breakfast cereal."  
  
The mattress squeaked as John dropped down on its edge. "It's one of four houses," he said, a little exasperatedly. Bending over, he unlaced his brown oxfords, pulled them off and aligned them toe-forward under the bed.  
  
"Or a sickeningly cheery character on a twee children's programme," Sherlock retorted petulantly.  
  
John sat bolt upright, levelling a hard, commanding look at Sherlock. "It's where the magic hat put our _son_."  
  
Sherlock's hands fell limply to his sides, and he swallowed, eyes meeting John's in silent contrition.  


 

* * *

  
  
"We'll never catch enough," Lorcan declared despondently, dropping down onto the grassy bank. Summer sun glanced off the spun gold of his hair as his head drooped, his grip on the long, thin pole of his net slackening.  
  
Lysander grimaced at his brother. Though physically identical, his face was hard marble to Lorcan's soft, unfired clay. "We can't just give up," he said, an adamant glint in his eyes. "Mum needs Freshwater Plimpies for dinner."  
  
"Maybe we ought to split up," Hamish suggested, net held horizontal and ready.  
  
"There," Hattie said suddenly, pointing to a spot downstream where the water was licking against a clump of reeds.  
  
"But you can't see them, can you?" Lysander said. "Magical creatures are protected by anti-Muggle spells."  
  
"I don't need to see, you pillock, I'm _observing_ ," Hattie shot back sharply. Then she was off, charging along the bank of the stream, the long grass whispering against the denim of her jeans as it parted to either side of her.  
  
"Hattie!" Hamish called after her, but she was already pulling off her trainers and socks, tossing them onto the grass. Keeping her eyes fixed on the splashes spitting up between the reeds, she slipped into the water, cleanly as an otter, dug her heels into the slippery-smooth stones lining the stream bed and pushed herself forward against the current. The splashes stopped abruptly. Hattie paused, nerves on edge, heartbeat thundering in her ears. Seconds later, the splashing resumed, began drifting toward the edge of the reeds, and Hattie heaved in a quick breath and dove.  
  
Hamish screamed her name again, but then there was only the gentle, muffling murmur of flowing water in her ears. Her hand blundered around blindly in the green-brown murk. Bumped into reed-stalks, until at last it connected with something thin and reedlike but too slimy-slick, something that kicked wildly as her fingers closed around it.  
  
She leapt out of the water, curls matted and dripping, the struggling, invisible thing clutched above her head by its leg. "I got a Plimpy, right?" she called up at the three faces starring down at her from the bank.  


 

* * *

  
  
"I don't understand the point of this," Rose pronounced, waving her hand to indicate the opulently-appointed room. "'The Diogenes Club.' Why go to all the bother when one could just stay home and enjoy being ignored?"  
  
"Silence has its place," Mycroft replied tightly, lifting his whiskey tumbler from the side table next to his armchair.  
  
Rose watched him take a small, measured sip, hot white anger coiling in her gut like a snake readying to strike. "Silence had a place when witches and wizards were being burned at the stake," she said a moment later.  
  
Mycroft slammed the glass down, the pale amber liquid inside sloshing from side to side in a high, seesawing wave. "I'm the only reason you're not in Azkaban!" he snapped, a rough, forceful snarl that twisted his face into an ugly knot.  
  
The unexpected outburst made Rose's heart jump, but she steeled her nerves, sneered, "How touching."  
  
"You've no idea the damage you've done. Three years of careful negotiation between the Muggle and wizarding governments of dozens of countries, erased by the stunt of an impetuous, self-important young woman."  
  
"The broadcast was the product of cooperation between both democratically-elected governments of Iceland."  
  
"It was the single largest breach of the Statute of Secrecy in history. Small mercy it took place on a geographically-isolated, sparsely-populated island, or else I fear the fallout could not have been...contained."  
  
"That's what you call scrubbing the minds of four hundred thousand Icelandic Muggles? 'Containment?'"  
  
"Yes," Mycroft answered without hesitation.  
  
"I'm pretty sure 'crime against humanity' is the description history books will use," Rose countered.  
  
"The measure seems rather humane balanced against the predicted outcome of prematurely lifting the Statute: 'Widespread political destabilisation leading to mass killings of witches and wizards in many areas of the world.'"  
  
At a loss for words, Rose slumped back in her chair in defeat, hugging her arms across her chest. She let her gaze drift to a bookshelf on the far side of the room, worrying at a loose, dangling thread on one sleeve with her thumb.  
  
"Your little advocacy group, needless to say, is no more," Mycroft informed her.  
  
"It began with us. Doesn't mean it ends with us. One day the genie'll be too big to stuff back in the bottle."  


 

* * *

  
  
The flicker of fairy lights played across Sherlock's face in a kaleidoscope of colour as he swooped down over Hamish. "What did she say to you?" he demanded, seizing his son's shoulders a little more roughly than intended. His long white thumbs decapitated two of the reindeer sweeping over the snowy vista on the thirteen-year-old's jumper.  
  
Hamish blinked wide brown eyes up at him. "I don't — I'm sorry — it was like an hour ago..."  
  
"I need you to remember. What did your sister say? Tell me _precisely_. It's imperative. Think, Hamish. _Think_."  
  
"I asked her if she was happy with all her Christmas-slash-birthday presents. She said, 'I didn't get a letter,' and I said, 'You got loads,' and then she yelled, 'Shut up, I'm going to my mind castle,' and ran out."  
  
Sherlock abruptly released Hamish and strode out of the living room. Casting a brief look at Molly, John followed him into the front hall, grabbed his parka off of the rack as Sherlock fastened his scarf and flicked up his coat collar.  
  
"When I was eleven, John, my mind palace was a literal place: the attic," Sherlock told him.  
  
They poured out of the warmth of the cottage into the biting-cold stillness of the night. John struggled to keep pace with Sherlock as he cut a swift, swishing path through the ankle-deep snow, thick snowflakes pelting against his face. His knees really weren't what they used to be. The beam of his torch flitted over the ghostly shadow-shapes of the bare-branched trees in the orchard, between the squat, snow-capped forms of the rowed beehives.  
  
Sherlock's torch remained fixed forward, guiding him to the disused barn at the far end of the farm, through its ajar door and toward the sobbing, shivering creature huddled beneath a moldering saddle blanket in one corner.  
  
"You idiot child," he hissed, tearing off his coat and wrapping it around Hattie's trembling shoulders.  
  
"I thought it might come today...just maybe...my Hogwarts letter," the girl sniffled brokenly.  
  
Sherlock's hands were a blur, touching, assessing, cupping her thin face and brushing damp curls off of her cheeks. "Heaven is just a vapid story," he told her, voice soft despite the harshness of his words. "If you die, there is _nothing_." Then, so quietly that John almost didn't hear it, "There is nothing if you die."  
  
"I'm sorry...I'm sorry I'm not like Hamish...I'm sorry..."  
  
Lifting Hattie up into his arms, Sherlock said, "Don't be ridiculous. You've no reason to be sorry."


	10. Chapter 10

The barn owl swept into the sunroom and dropped a copy of the _Evening Prophet_ on the table with a muted _thump_. Hermione's head snapped up, met the bird's dark, slanting eyes. It tilted its serene, heart-shaped face at her with mingled curiosity and expectation, its talons clicking against the glass tabletop as it shifted closer to her.  
  
Hermione dug a Knut out of her pocket and set it down in front of the owl. It bent to take the coin in its beak. Smiling, Hermione curled her index finger and stroked it through the soft, frogspawn-speckled plumage on its chest.  
  
 _Owls_ , she thought fondly. Wise, vigilant creatures, the seemingly mundane glue that held wizarding society together.  
  
She let her gaze drift out the half-open glass sliding door to where Ron was de-gnoming a flowerbed in the garden. _Owls mate for life_ , she realized with sudden, sobering sadness, her stroking finger stilling. The owl gave a quiet hoot, then flew out of the room into the reddening sky, leaving Hermione with a strange emptiness in her chest.  
  
Letting her gaze fall to the paper on the table, she read the cover headline, a shocked gasp stabbing out of her.

 

* * *

  
  
Scorpius bent down, his long hair curtaining his face as he carefully plucked a fat-cheeked, sleeping infant out of the nest of blankets stuffed into an oversized terracotta flowerpot pushed up against the living room wall. Walking over to where Mycroft was sitting in an armchair, Scorpius set the baby down in his arms, a wide, goofy grin on his face.  
  
"My grandson sleeps in a pot?" Mycroft asked dubiously, hand fitting around the back of the baby's head. His hair was the white-blond of a Malfoy, with the tight, coiling curl of a Granger and the fineness of a Holmes.  
  
"A jar," Scorpius corrected. "Like his namesake — that Ancient Greek philosopher."  
  
"Diogenes of Sinope," Mycroft said, turning to look at Rose with a sharply cocked eyebrow.  
  
"We've got a proper cot," Rose assured him. She intuitively knew that he was fighting an urge to roll his eyes. "Scorpius just thinks it's...amusing...to put him down for naps in that thing when we've company."  
   
Scorpius dropped down on the sofa beside Rose, slinging a long, lazily affectionate arm over her shoulders. The rough unbleached linen of his robe rasped against the skin exposed by the boat-neck collar of her dress.  
  
Mycroft's gaze fell back to the baby in his arms. "I'm assured the Integrated Education Act will pass."  
  
"My God," Rose clucked sardonically. "Muggle and magical children attending primary school together. _The horror_."  
  
"Such is the new order," Mycroft said.  
  
Diogenes whimpered and squirmed. Blinked open blue eyes, batted his tiny fists in the air, and let out a high wail. Scorpius shot up off of the couch. Taking his son from Mycroft, he walked out of the room, humming an off-key lullaby.  
  
"I'm sorry," Rose said after a moment of weighted silence passed.  
  
"The fallout has been...manageable. Canada has been quite compliant in accepting refugees."  
  
Rose bit her bottom lip and shook her head slightly. "I meant I'm sorry we can't get along like we should."  
  
"You're hardly the first relation to have declared me an arch-enemy," Mycroft noted, thin lips curving into a smile.

 

* * *

  
  
"Surely there's _something_ ," Sherlock insisted, waving his hand vaguely. "Some potion. Some spell."  
  
Hermione shook her head, swallowing against the hard, dry knot in her throat.  
  
Sherlock sprung to his feet. Pressing his hands together in front of his mouth, he stalked back and forth in the space between where his chrome-framed, black leather armchair and John's faded red one were set in front of the fireplace. John caught the edge of his sleeve, said, "Sherlock," and he stilled as suddenly as if he'd been slapped.  
  
As Sherlock dropped down onto the arm of John's chair, he pinned Hermione with an intense, accusatory glare. "Don't think I haven't deduced the cause of a certain extraordinary recovery by now," he told her in a low tone.  
  
"Magic can do many things, but it can't do everything," Hermione said, struggling to keep her voice even.  
  
Releasing a barely-audible sigh, Sherlock raised a hand, swept it through his silver-threaded curls. "How long?"  
  
"Months," Mycroft answered unflinchingly.  
  
Sherlock looked down at John. John tipped his head up and around to meet his eyes. Flicking his tongue over his lower lip, he said, "It's already metastasised. A few months. Maybe up to a year with aggressive treatment and luck."  
  
"There must —"  
  
"There's nothing to do but accept it, dear brother. Come now. Haven't you made a career of dealing with death?"  
  
Sherlock's jaw tensed. His gaze, as it met Mycroft's, was uncharacteristically open. "After the fact."  
  
A grim smile stretched Mycroft's lips. "If I'd known it wouldn't affect the outcome, I wouldn't have bothered with low-tar cigarettes."

 

* * *

  
  
Mycroft's fingers were parchment-dry as they closed around Hermione's curled fist. She let out a strangled noise something like a sob, doubled forward in her chair until her face was pressed to the itchy white crochet blanket spilling over the side of his hospital bed, the crown of her head nudging into the too-thin ridge of his flank. After a moment, his hand loosed hers to trail up her neck, fingers meshing in her hair as his thumb rounded her ear.  
  
When she sat upright again untold minutes later, face an undignified, wet red, his eyes found hers. His nose stood out sharply between gaunt, hollow cheeks, and what little hair he'd had left before starting chemotherapy was now lost.  
  
"I've only been a coward once in my life," she told him quietly, her tongue feeling dry and thick in her mouth.  
  
"You were certainly indecisive at times, but never a coward," he replied, voice a rasping husk of its former crispness.  
  
Hermione heaved out a heavy, shuddering sigh, her shoulders slumping. "You deserved more than indecision."  
  
"I never allowed myself...expectations. A private hope, perhaps, but nothing so utterly foolish as a single expectation."  
  
"You don't suffer fools, and yet you suffered me," she remarked with a fragile laugh.  
  
He smiled at her, the barest curl of thin lips, a flicker of warmth shining through the smooth one-way glass of his face. His hand found hers again, thumb tracing minute circles on its back, telegraphing truths which defied expression.  
  
"Sometimes it felt like my heart was being pulled apart," Hermione confessed. "Torn between my world and yours."  
  
"There is only one world now," said Mycroft.


End file.
